Issue #17
Fall/Winter 1998
Memory/Place

I wanted to call this journal something like traces or residues. Not that I think memory is trash, but the feeling of looking at the handwriting on a rolodex card of someone who isn't there, but whose mind and feeling somehow persists, is like the feeling of dust on the tongue. Performance is always lamented as lost once the show is over, as is work done in the studio. Yet I have felt something remaining in the places where people thought deeply, discovered something, moved someone else, left their sweat and the echoes of their thought. The past haunts the aesthetics, values and structures of Danspace and Movement Research in some very direct ways. I remember standing on Avenue A with Guy Yarden who told me "we don't really invite critics" and a year later Carol Swann said when she started presenting work "I didn't want critics to come". This journal is a scrapbook, a collective photo album of events that only a small number witnessed, long views of what the beginning looks like from now, and close-ups of present memories in the making.
Movement Research began as a collective of post-Judson artists wanting to go into the studio with questions for each other, wanting a center or a school. Danspace began with Larry Fagin, a poet working with the Poetry Project, assisting dancers who wished to perform in St. Mark's Church. Movement Research is still primarily a place to study and Danspace to see performance: both support experimentation and risk-taking. It is especially great that the two have joined up for this journal, as Danspace often provides a public face for work coming out of Movement Research. There are many personal crossovers as well: the first singular director for MR, Cynthia Hedstrom, left to take over from Larry Fagin at Danspace. From the first she and Mary Overlie were crucial to both organizations. There is a huge legacy shared by both organizations; everyone in this journal has felt the burden of history staring back at them. It is important to get it right, to connect the pieces of one's lineage: yet in the physical act of remembering together, going into that squinty-eyed state of "when was that...who was there?" is all the fragility and random contingency underneath history. Here we have had the unusual opportunity to dig into the corners and be surprised at how much we do remember, and how those memories differ, overlap and enrich one another.
Editorial team
Editor-In-Chief
Anya Pryor
Contributing Editor
Carol Mullins
Design
Andrew Fearnside
Contributor
Catherine Levine - Laurie Uprichard - Christina Svane - Barbara Moore - Dona Ann McAdams - Yoshiko Chuma - Anya Pryor - Daniel Lepkoff - Nancy Topf - Carol Swann - Wendell Beavers - Steve Paxton - Luis Lara Malvacias - Laurel George - Jon Kinzel - Nancy Saint Paul - Linda Austin - Clarinda Mac Low - Ishmael Houston-Jones - Terry Fox - Douglas Dunn - Yoshiko Chuma - Larry Fagin - Sara Rudner - Barbara Dilley - Stefa Zawerucha - Koosil-ja Hwang - Kenneth King - Wendy Perron - Myrna Packer - Simone Forti
Articles
Cover Photos
Editor’s Note
ABOUT THE TITLE (on memory) I wanted to call this journal something like traces or residues. Not that I think memory is trash, but the feeling of looking at the...
Alone and By Itself
As a dancer for many years in New York studying with people like Carol Conway and Phyllis Lamhut and working at places like the Laban/ Bartenieff Institute and American Ballet...
A Magical Place
I first visited St. Mark's Church in 1973, before there was a Danspace Project, to watch a rehearsal of Meredith Monk-I think it was Songs from the Hill. I was...
Memory Improvisation
You know that saffron color of food in windows poised in Puerto Rican diners on Canal Street? That's the color of my memory of the first moment Mary Overlie mentioned...
Peter Moore at Judson
This photograph, with no visual clues as to when it was taken, overwhelms me. There's Peter as he always appeared, slightly hunched over, preparing to shoot from the choir loft,...
Cynthia Hedstrom Talks with Yoshiko Chuma and Anya Pryor
YC: Now it's twenty years and I have been a kind of witness. But my position was very different from yours...What was important in the beginning? CH: Well the Judson...
Invisible History
When it finally becomes impossible to take your friends to the places you cherished as a child, because those places no longer exist, then you truly feel the insanity, tenacity,...
Freely Floating, Grass Grows Through Concrete: Twenty Years with Movement Research
I love the words Movement Research. Twenty years for me and Movement Research. We share this anniversary. I taught during Movement Research's first year (spring '79) and many thereafter, a...
1981-1984 Transition Years
After the collective (Beth Goren, Danny Lepkoff, Christie Svane, Cynthia Hedstrom. Wendell Beavers and Mary Overlie), after Cynthia Hedstrom, after Wendell Beavers in the administrative chair, along came me: the...
Notes on History
Having written down a memory -a memoir-several years ago, I have no delusions that it is actually history. Memory is not history. Sometimes this is easy to forget so I...
RE Dunn
Time is configured for us in many ways: astronomical movements, clocks, calendars. Subjectively we have sensations, suppers, and friends who create our eras, our memories of a time in a...
Untitled
The Changing Contours of Movement Research
In an interview from December 1984, Cathy Edwards, former co-director of Movement Research talks with Laurel George about Richard Elovich, Performance Journal #3, the Monday night series at Judson Church,...
Memories of the Organization
Varick St. Pigeons cooing and pigeon poop outside the office. Ethnic Folk Arts, the dimmer board, AIDS activism poster art, period looking bar where everyone changed and put things. The...
Poems
Thirty-five Telephone Books Frrriipp Frrriiiiip yellow pages—white pages falling balcony to floor Rebecca making them fly Clarinda dodging volumes of names, numbers and addresses. Performance-artist, poet-papa* nods approval of jeune...
The Making of Memory: Improvising Across the Border
May 1998 Mexico City "The past is a blurred form of the present that coexists with the not-blurred present in which we normally live." Or so it is for one...
Untitled
Mr & St. Mark’s Memories
I. Introduction Memories exist as wordless images, ghosts of sensation that come back as strong as the original sensation, three-dimensional experiential blocks of time, re-experienced instantaneously when the memory is...
Lost and Found, Memories of John Bernd at St. Mark’s Church
He and I are stalking one another in a pool of light. Occasionally he tackles and pins me. Or I jump up onto his shoulder. The sound score is him...
Personal Mind
In a snowstorm the day after New Year's 1984, I moved to New York City to begin a new job as Director of the Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church...
Gestures on Red
Until 1976 the Sanctuary at St. Mark's had immovable pews that filled two thirds of the floor space. Performers worked on a patch of maroon linoleum between the front pew...
20 Years Dancing at Danspace
I first danced at Danspace in Pooh Kaye's Oh in 1978 soon after landing in Manhattan. I was paid $60, and remember being surprised about getting paid at all. The...
Larry Fagin Tries Hard to Remember
I was the assistant director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church working with director Anne Waldman, when a group of six women approached me about dancing in the...
Dancing-on-View 1975
Maybe it was Larry Fagin who called me, maybe it was Barbara Dilley, asking if I would participate in a new dance series at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bouwerie. I had...
Memories of “Sets”
Looking at the photographs of "Sets" done at St. Mark's Church always brings a rush of delight. The five of us, myself, Cynthia Hedstrom. Eva Meier. Terry O'Reilly and Steve...
The Danspace Project Gets Started
Amazing circumstances and even more amazing people led to the beginnings of the Danspace Project in St. Mark's Church. The visionary rector of the Church in the twenties and early...
What I Saw at the Enlightenment-Spectral Hoedown
David Fritz invited Carol Mullins, Roma Flowers and Philip Sandstrom to join him in Spectral Hoedown at the Danspace Project in November 1996. The four designers, improvising two at a...
Names
Laurie Uprichard/ Danspace Project gave me an opportunity for the journey where I discovered myself again. I create dance works reflecting this society and often the placement of the individual...
Moose on the Loose (for Bob Holman)
survival tactics for endangered species (you and I) (scene: a pine forest dim, diced by diagonally slanting light beams splicing spruce, firs white birch) their canopy of tented leaves fallen...
The Holes in Tin Quiz
I like a structure that holds a piece together but also pulls it apart. If the fabric of the piece is woven so tightly that there are no holes, a...
Recollections of Danspace
I am asked to write my memories of shows that Art Bridgman and I choreographed at Danspace over the last ten years. 1989: Water's Edge, A Dance for Fifteen Pregnant...
Interview with Nina Martin
S) You've recently moved from New York to San Diego, where you're involved in building a dance community. And teaching. I thought we'd talk about that, and about Danspace Project...
Letters to the Editor
Barbara Mahler and I are both very flattered to find that your 20th Anniversary Commemorative t-shirt carried the phrase "sitz bones 10 heels". As you and I both know this...